PRESS
The field in print: how live visuals have been written about
Live visuals are documented badly. The work is ephemeral, the credits are buried, and most coverage describes how a show felt rather than how it was built. This page is about the record itself.
Why this field is badly documented
three kinds of source, none of them written for thisAnyone researching this field runs into the same wall. The shows are gone, the footage was shot for other purposes, and the people who built them were not credited in the pieces that survive.
What documentation exists clusters in three places. Tool vendors publish gig reports, which are technically detailed and commercially motivated in roughly equal measure: the running examples are Resolume’s blog and Notch’s show write-ups. Creative-coding and digital-art publications cover the work as practice, which is the most useful strand and the smallest; CDM is the long-running one. And the general music press covers the same shows for a readership that wants to know what the night was like, legitimate, but it does not preserve method.
Those three links are what the sections below mean by a source. None of them is a substitute for the others, and the gap between what a vendor will say and what a practice publication will say is most of what makes this field hard to research.
What each kind of source is good for
A vendor gig report will tell you which machine ran what, how many outputs were used and where the redundancy sat. It will not tell you which of those decisions was regretted. Read for hardware, discounted for conclusions.
A practice piece in a creative-coding or digital-art publication is the opposite: strong on why a technique was chosen, frequently vague about the rig. It is the only strand that reliably names the people who did the work.
Music coverage is the largest by volume and the thinnest for this purpose. It documents that a thing existed and how it felt, which is worth something, a show that nobody wrote about at all leaves no trace whatsoever.
What is missing, and why it stays missing
Three things are almost never recorded. The first is sequence, who was waiting on whom, and what arrived late. That is the single most useful fact about any production and it appears in no published account, because it reflects badly on someone.
The second is the version that did not work. Designs are documented in their final state. The two earlier attempts, which are where the actual learning is, are not photographed and not described.
The third is attribution below the top line. A show is credited to a designer or a studio; the person who solved the hard problem inside it is frequently uncredited, and after a few years is unrecoverable.
How this site reads the record
Every page here states what is documented and what is not. Where the published record is thin the page says so rather than filling the gap, and where a figure is contested both versions appear. Nothing is reconstructed from a photograph: a cable count that cannot be sourced is not reported.
That discipline is why the production entries are shorter than they could be. It would be easy to write another two hundred words per page by inferring the rig from images. It would also be fiction, and the whole value of a reference is that it does not do that.
Where to start, depending on what you want
If you want to know how something was built, the discipline pages are the honest route: projection mapping for surfaces that are not flat, LED and volumetric for walls and for depth, and stage architecture for what the venue will physically carry.
If you want to know what it is like to run one, start with VJ workflow and light programming, which cover the half of the craft that happens under a clock.
If you are specifying rather than reading, the throw-distance calculator and the pixel-pitch calculator do the two sums that get done wrong most often, and the toolchain sets out which program owns which job. Terms are defined once in the glossary, and shorter observations that do not fit a reference page are collected in the journal.
One recurring headline from the period states the ambition better than most of the articles under it: from Pink Floyd to Flying Lotus, examining the past, present and future of live performance visuals. That is the question this site is organised around.
In this section
4 pages- THE RECORD The Productions What this site documents directly: nine productions, each with the technical problem it answered. Read →
- THE METHOD Stage & Scenic Design The four design disciplines, written up as method rather than as anecdote. Read →
- THE PRACTICE Real-Time & VJ Craft How the picture is authored, run and lit on the night. Read →
- THE SOFTWARE The Toolchain What the work is actually made in, and which tool owns which job. Read →
Questions
the things people ask about thisWhy is live visuals coverage so thin?
Three reasons compound. The work is ephemeral; it exists for two hours and survives only as footage shot for other purposes. Credits are buried, because visual designers are rarely billed. And the audience for technical writing about it is small, so most coverage is written for a general readership and stops at description.
Which publications cover it seriously?
Trade and tool-adjacent outlets do the best technical work: software vendors publishing gig reports, creative-coding communities, and digital-art publications. General music press covers the same shows but rarely gets past what the room felt like.
Is footage a reliable record?
Only partly, and it is worth being explicit about why. Cameras expose for the performer, not the picture; LED walls moire on sensors; and the parallax that makes volumetric work read is exactly what a single lens cannot capture. A show that looked extraordinary in the room can document badly.
How does this site handle sourcing?
By documenting what published material supports and saying so where the record is thin. Where a technique is described in general terms, it is described as general practice rather than attributed to a specific production without evidence.